


(loving you had) consequences

by uselessphillie



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, M/M, Parallel Universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 19:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17452961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uselessphillie/pseuds/uselessphillie
Summary: The last dozen or so jumps he’s made have been exhausting, draining nearly all of his core energy each time. He’s been searching and searching for a good timeline to lie down in, one where Phil will hold him and tell him he loves him while the stars reclaim his energy for themselves.





	(loving you had) consequences

As soon as he opens his eyes, Dan knows that this timeline will be the end for him.

He’s lying on his side in a bed, shirtless and sockless and swathed in warm grey sheets. The blanket lump beside him is decidedly Phil-shaped, a bit of black hair poking out from the top of the duvet.

(He’s woken up in timelines where the lump isn’t Phil-shaped. Those universes are never very good to him.)

Slowly, Dan extracts his limbs from the bedcovers, looking down at his hands and the length of his body. He’s lost himself many times in the depths of some internet forum, in stories of Jumpers waking up with nine toes or all their freckles rearranged, but he’s always looked the same. He gets older or younger but never in any way that matters, never by a metric that can be measured by the human understanding of time. He rubs the palms of his hands together, dissipating the last of his jump energy into the ether, and turns back towards Phil.

Reaching out under the duvet, his hand connects with the bare plane of Phil’s back. With a relieved sigh, he scoots over to press his chest against the sleep-warmed skin, feeling some of the magnetic tension unravel as their bodies come together.

(The ones without Phil are the hardest, a tightly-wound spring wedged under his ribcage with no chance of relief. It’s worse than any physical pain he’s known.)

Phil stirs as Dan wraps his arms around him. He takes in a deep breath of air and stretches his long body in both directions, pressing cold feet back into Dan’s shins before relaxing again. He wiggles around until all the empty spaces between them disappear, finding Dan’s hand and covering it with his own.

“Wh’time is it?” Phil mumbles, the question obscured by the way his face is still smushed into the pillow.

Dan, who knows precisely what time it is in every stretch of every universe, kisses his shoulder and says, “Dunno. Let’s sleep still.”

Phil’s most of the way back there already, his heartbeat slow and steady under Dan’s palm. “Mmm. ‘Kay.”

Dan never sleeps, not when he can have this instead. He lies perfectly still and counts Phil’s breaths, grounds himself against Phil’s solid form and the sharp orange perfume of his shampoo. Without warning, a wave of dizziness sparks gold and white across his vision, and closing his eyes only gives it a stark black canvas for its performance.

It’s then that he knows it with absolute certainty.

It’s the end. 

***

Dan, for all the ways that he is timeless and ageless and immune from all the normal laws of the universe, is dying.

He’s suspected it for some time, now, of course. The last dozen or so jumps he’s made have been exhausting, draining nearly all of his core energy each time. He’s been searching and searching for a good timeline to lie down in, one where Phil will hold him and tell him he loves him while the stars reclaim his energy for themselves.

The sun slants through the open windows now, bright and far too warm for April. Idly, Dan wonders if it was him or Phil who forgot to close the blinds last night. Probably Phil. There’s other timelines where it’s always Phil.   

Phil’s breathing stutters as the sun shifts to shine directly on his face, and he turns in Dan’s arms to press into his shoulder instead. He hitches one leg up and over Dan’s hip so that he’s lying half on top of him, effectively pinning him to the mattress with his weight. 

The stars could take him here, Dan thinks, with his entire right side numb and Phil’s messy bedhead tickling his chin.

But it’s not quite time yet.

***

Phil’s fingers tickle over his ribcage as he wakes.

He stretches his body lazily out and over Dan’s, poking an elbow into his stomach and twisting his wrists around so that they make horrible little cracking sounds. Dan reaches out and catches one hand mid-twist, bringing it to his lips and pressing feather-light kisses to the delicate skin. Phil giggles and arches up to kiss him properly, sleepy and messy and smiling and Dan loves him so much. He just loves him so much.

Phil sits up a bit and feels his way along his bedside table for his glasses, putting them on before flopping back down against the pillows and lolling his head to the side. Dan has a split second of panic, the way he always does in these timelines, before Phil smiles and says, “Oh. Hello.” His voice is startlingly calm, as if he regularly wakes up to time-traveling boyfriends in his bed.

Which, Dan supposes, he kind of does.    

He doesn’t know how Phil always manages to tell him and his non-Jumper equivalent apart, and he’s not really keen on finding out. He’s just glad for Phil’s routine acceptance of the magical, the unexplainable. Glad that Phil has never once sent him away, never asked where the  _ real Dan  _ had gone or when he’d be coming back. 

“It’s been awhile,” Phil says into the quiet between them. 

“Has it?” Dan doesn’t know anymore. He used to try and keep track, wanted to figure out if he could jump to specific timelines or moments. The few times he’d managed it were anomalies, he’s fairly certain. The randomness of the universe is the most dominant force of all. 

Phil nods. “Couple years. I was starting to think something had happened to you.”

Dan’s heart lurches in his chest. He hasn’t seen his face yet but he must not look too sick, for Phil to be so close and not see that anything is wrong. He tries to be grateful, that a slow decay means more time here. With Phil.  

“I missed you,” Dan says in lieu of any actual explanation. He doesn’t have one, anyway.

Phil smiles, looks up at Dan like he hung each and every star in the sky just for him. “Will you tell me where you’ve been?”

“If you like.”

Phil kisses him again, longer and slower this time. “Coffee first,” he says against Dan’s lips. “You stay here. Don’t leave.”

“I won’t,” Dan says, and it feels like a broken promise.

***

Dan drags himself out of bed and moves to the window after Phil disappears to the kitchen. The city down below is unmistakably London; it’s the only skyline he’d recognize anywhere. They live here in a lot of timelines, in different flats and different neighborhoods. There’s one where they have a stone house on the outskirts of the city with a massive garden and a swing - he’s spent eternities trying to get back to that one.  

He turns to get back into bed, his bare feet catching on a couple pieces of clothing scattered on the floor. One is a soft-looking black hoodie, and when he picks it up he notices that it’s emblazoned with a small white logo. He traces over the raised lines of the design, one he’s never seen before - two capital letter I’s surrounded by a hexagon. Dan pulls it over his head and tugs the cuffs down over his knuckles, crawling back under the covers.

He feels a bit of heat in his left hand, the way he always does after a jump, but shouldn’t it have all dissipated by now? It’s been hours since he got here. He curls his hand in and out of a fist a  few times, feeling the energy crackle across his skin. 

It’s fine.

***    

Phil brings a wooden tray loaded down with plates of jammy toast and two mugs of coffee, one just slightly lighter in color than the other. He hands Dan the darker one and makes himself a home against Dan’s side. 

“What’s this?” Dan asks, tapping a finger over his heart where the logo sits. 

Phil smiles, taking a large sip from his mug even though the liquid must still be scalding. “It’s our stage show. ‘Interactive Introverts’? That’s like, the I’s, y’know. We’ve only just gotten back from touring it, actually, took it ‘round the whole world.”

“Really?” Dan can’t help the grin that spreads across his face. “That’s incredible.”

“It was. You were brilliant, Dan, wish you could’ve seen yourself. You should try to jump there, we could perform one together.” Phil suggests it so casually, as if all Dan had to do was rewind a movie of their life and press play. Phil’s never been big on the intricacies of it all. He leans back into Dan’s chest some more, blowing gently over the rim of his mug.

“Maybe,” Dan says quietly, turning to press his lips against Phil’s temple. “Tell me some stories about it.”

Phil does, the sun rises high into the sky while they talk about where they got the best pizzas in America, cramming their noodle bodies into one tiny bunk when they couldn’t sleep at night, the time someone drove their car into the tour bus. Freezing their asses off in Australia just to walk along the beach together. Taking their rare days off to act like tourists in a new city and making a list of all the places they want to go back to. Phil sounds so fucking  _ happy _ and Dan should just leave now, should let him go back to having a version of his boyfriend that isn’t leaking void energy and feeling the universe wrap its hand around his throat more tightly with every passing second. 

“Dan? Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” It’s not til Phil is climbing into his lap and smudging his thumb through some wetness on his cheeks that he even realizes that he’s crying. He leans heavily into Phil’s shoulder and digs his fingers into his hips, trying to ground himself again, to calm down.  _ Everything’s  _ wrong. His energy ripples quick and vicious under his skin, speeding up his heartbeat and making pain prickle at his extremities.  

_ “Phil,”  _ he chokes out on a sob. 

“Shh, shhhh, you’re okay. You’re okay,” Phil says softly, but Dan can hear that he’s scared. He shakes his head, still hiding in Phil’s shoulder. He’s so far from okay.

Phil sits back a bit and cups a hand around his jaw, turning his face gently to the side. Dan stays still and lets him trace a single finger down the mark that he can feel like a brand, the place where his skin has split open to reveal stardust and fire underneath. It runs from his ear down and over his pulsepoint, the cool pressure of Phil’s finger sealing it over and leaving only a faint white scar.  

“You’re sick,” Phil says, slowly. Some force of the universe reaches out a star-clad palm, wraps it around Dan’s heart and squeezes hard. 

Dan can’t even bear to speak; he takes a breath but exhales it on a cough. Phil pulls him in again against his body, rubs gentle circles into his back until he can breathe normally. He stays with his face pressed to Phil’s shoulder, listens to the erratic  _ thump-thump, thump-thump  _ of his own heart breaking.

“It’s the convergence,” Phil says into the quiet of their room. His voice still sounds calm, even. 

Dan just sighs and pushes back a new wave of tears. 

The forums say this:  _ Convergence is the bending of one universe and the distortion of the next. A Jumper may experience the sensation of being torn apart or disintegrated, if this phenomenon were to ever occur. To the best of our knowledge, no convergence events have ever been reliably recorded.   _

Most Jumpers suspected it to just be a rumor, a wild conspiracy concocted by those who wanted only to create tension and fear. Dan had thought that’s all it was. At the very least, he thought he had time. 

***

(A memory: Dan, much younger than they are now. An open laptop, a hundred bookmarked web pages.) 

_ (I’ll bend it right back, Phil. Nothing will take me away from you.) _

***

They stay in bed. Phil closes the windows and the blinds and entangles their bodies so thoroughly that Dan could forget where his own ends and Phil’s begins, if he wanted to.

He wants to.

Phil has so many questions, and Dan has no good answers.

_ Where will you go?  _

(He doesn’t know. The stars formed him and the stars will take him back. What does it mean to be made of stardust?)

_ Does it hurt? _

(He lies.)

(Phil smoothes his hands over the cracks, watches the relief wash over Dan’s face each time.)

_ Will I ever see you again? _

(All the timelines blur together. Maybe he knows this Phil further down the line, maybe they have a garden with a swing and sets of little feet trampling over the ivy.)

_ Why now? _

_ Why you? _

_ Why me? _

(Dan’s crying again. Phil quiets, finally, holds him and kisses him and tells him that he’ll never stop looking up at the stars.)

***

It’s time. Dan knows it likes he knows the tilt of the Earth, like he knows the exact pattern of the freckles on Phil shoulders and every shade of color in his eyes.  

“Phil,” he croaks out. His voice is hoarse. He licks his lips and tries again. “Phil.”

“What?”

There’s a burst of the static in his ears, whiting out his mind for a moment. When he can focus again, Phil has sat up a bit and is looking down at him in concern. 

“Tell me you love me.”

Phil’s breath hitches and he shakes his head. A tear rolls down his cheek and splashes onto Dan’s jaw. “No. Don’t do that, don’t say goodbye to me. It’s not time yet.”

But Phil doesn’t know anything about time. How could he?

“Please,” Dan says. It hurts to breathe, now. He feels far too warm, everything in his core is being jumbled around and bursting with kinetic energy. Phil’s hands on his skin are a cooling balm, and he leans desperately into them. He presses all his lifeforce against the bend of the universe, in a hopeless attempt to hold straight something that can only be curved.  _ Just a little longer,  _ he says. The stars don’t answer him.

He looks blearily up at Phil. In his memory, the two of them are always so young, so reckless; he says things like  _ I’d find you in any world  _ and Phil believes him without question. For him, there was nothing before Phil and there’ll be nothing after, just an eternal loop of discovery and loss and love. 

He inhales and there’s fire in his lungs. He must make some sort of distressed noise because Phil is suddenly even closer, smoothing a hand down over his chest and saying, “It’s okay, you’re okay. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

Dan forces his mouth into the shape of an L, even though no sound comes out. He has to hear it, one last time. 

“I love you,” Phil whispers, so close that Dan only has to tilt his head the slightest bit for them to be kissing.

It’s what he hears echoing around him as the heat intensifies and overtakes his body, as the bend of the universe crushes him and sends him spiraling into oblivion. 

Somewhere, another Dan comes home to his Phil sobbing into empty grey sheets, one who clings to him as though if he lets go, he’ll disappear. 

(He won’t. It’s not time yet.)

**Author's Note:**

> sorry :(
> 
> i crave your thoughts and opinions on this one, since it's quite different from what i usually write.
> 
> read and reblog on tumblr [here](https://uselessphillie.tumblr.com/post/182090079420/fic-loving-you-had-consequences) xx


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